Technology Tales

Talent crunch may hit CIL top deck - Report

Coal News - Published on Tue, 11 Dec 2018

ET reported that top bosses at Coal India have recently realised that it is slated to run into serious leadership crisis 4-5 years from now, when there won’t be any adequately experienced general managers to run the state-run company. General managers are the senior-most non-board level executives and every department requires at least one to run smoothly. Additionally, each coal-bearing area at all its coal producing subsidiaries has one or two general managers depending on the size of the coalfield. At present there are more than 500 general managers in Coal India and subsidiaries who take care of most day-to-day ground-level activities.

A company executive said that “For 14 years, between 1993 and 2007, Coal India had stopped recruiting executives on the pretext of excess manpower. It takes at least 20-25 years for an executive joining Coal India at the junior most grade (E1) to gather enough experience to assume a general manager’s (E8) position. Since there were no recruitments between 1993 and 2007, Coal India would not have enough adequately experienced executives to take over as general managers starting this year. In the meantime, executives who joined prior to 1993 are close to their retirement.”

A senior Coal India executive said that “The issue has already started to show its ugly head and all of the 500-odd existing general managers are slated to retire 5-6 years from now. It cannot be solved through lateral recruitment since such a large number of adequately experienced executives may not be at all available.”